Please go back and re-read some pulp scifi from, say, 70 years back and then spend some time scrolling through microfilm copies of newspapers from the same era.
You will find that SciFi has been mostly social commentary for quite a long time; what tends to throw us is familiarity!
Having read a ton of sci-fi from that era, they were entertaining even if one overlooked the social commentary. Young me did not give a hoot that Star Trek's "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was supposed to be social commentary but I can still recite the USS Enterprise's destruct sequence from memory because of the tension the cast and director put into that scene.
Being entertaining comes before social commentary, period. Modern entertainment is scorned by the public precisely because they do the opposite.
On Star Trek, Nichols was one of the first Black women featured in a major television series. Her prominent supporting role as a bridge officer was unprecedented.
She was once tempted to leave the series; however, a conversation with Martin Luther King Jr. changed her mind.
No, there's a massive difference. Taking Star Trek as an example: most of the time (not all the time, I am well aware), old Trek series were careful to present social commentary in a way that trusted the viewer to draw his own conclusions. The writers may have had an opinion, but they avoided obviously taking a side and tried to present reasonable points of view all around even if they did gently nudge things to make one side seem better. By letting the viewer come to a conclusion naturally, they actually had persuasive power because they didn't antagonize the audience. New Star Trek, on the other hand, has the writers openly preaching to you. They have one side of an issue represented by paragons of virtue, the other side represented by the scum of the earth, and have characters say what a bad person one must be if they come down on the wrong side of this. There is no subtlety whatsoever, and it has no persuasive power because the writers are more interested in flipping the bird to those whom they consider evil than actually trying to educate or persuade the audience.
And while I'm speaking specifically of Trek, this happens a lot with modern sci-fi. There is so much bad, preachy writing out there. And while that may have always existed to some extent, it wasn't the norm. Now it is the norm and it sucks.
Which Star Trek was "trusting the viewer to draw their own conclusions"?
Was it the one where Kirk used "half-breed" as an insult so horrible and hurtful that it would reveal an android as an imposter (in a period where segregation was still legal in the US)?
Was it the one about a long-standing war between two peoples based entirely on the color of their skin?
How about the one with the Nazi planet?
Surely you're not referring to the one with the first interracial kiss - something so political that the network debated censoring it and caused Shatner to intentionally ruin takes of an alternative version?
Are you talking about the one which involved Kirk explicitly promoting contraception and calls out the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed "pro-life" alien race?
No, perhaps you're thinking of the one involving the torture of the leader of a revolutionary group.
"Patterns of Force" was broadcast within living memory of WW2; that the Ekosians were villains was as uncontroversial as water being wet. I always suspected they went with the WW2 German uniforms for the bad guys for that episode because they could rent them cheap (there were plenty of WW2 movies filmed in that era) to save on budget.
And the crew kissed aliens aplenty; an interspecies kiss was surely much worse than an interracial kiss to those who were uptight about such things.
It was probably the one where Picard refused to play god for an alien race because religion was a primitive superstition.
Or the one where they recover cryogenically frozen people from the 20th century and Picard shits on a venture capitalist.
Or the one where an alien race is outcast because they don't conform to gender norms and this is a bad thing.
Or the one where an admiral starts a witch-hunt on board the Enterprise trying to weed out a conspiracy and Picard goes into an anti-fascist rant.
Or the episode of DS9 that takes place during the 1950s where Sisko experiences racial segregation, and Star Trek is a sci-fi story he can't sell about a future he wants to live in.
Or the one that establishes the Bell Riots, a widespread anti-capitalist revolt that takes place among the homeless and immigrant populations.
What smelendez is alluding to is the matter of who is liable while fraud is being resolved.
In the US, a charge on your bank card results in at least a hold on your bank account - money you can't spend on anything else until the hold is lifted. Worst-case, there can be significant fees associated with this (overdraft, declined payments, etc.).
For most of us, that's a much bigger problem than a debt we may or may not end up paying interest on.
From personal experience, getting a credit card company to quickly resolve fraud cases is also much easier than getting a bank to do the same, even when it's ultimately the same institution.
Well... Book clubs, study groups, fraternal organizations, etc. have agendas that structure conversation. I've found this useful for even 1:1 conversations with friends.
Naturally, it's possible to take this too far; letting the conversation flow naturally before occasionally snapping back to the agenda is both more enjoyable and often more productive.
...this is also a common podcast format.
I have never heard the phrase "private podcast" used in this sense before (vs the group / company internal sense), but... I kinda like it; sets up some potential useful expectations!
Because cameras alone do nothing useful, and there's precious little evidence these are being used to help address petty vandalism.
The UK already went down this road years ago - cameras everywhere, public restrooms nowhere, prompt and automatic ticketing for parking violations but precious little in the way of assistance from humans should you need it. The shut-in dotage of a former empire too afraid to leave its house.
> If we can be accused of anything in this context, it's not kicking bad people out aggressively enough, which seems very different from fostering bad ideas.
It's not very different. It's barely different at all.
Right now, I have five tomato plants growing in my garden. Two of them I planted; the other three grew from seeds left in the ground by tomatoes that dropped from plants growing last year. All I did was refuse to uproot them when they sprouted. Five healthy plants, with different origins, but the differences are largely insignificant.
Groups and behaviors are much the same way. I've worked with hundreds of moderators over the years who wished to keep their hands clean and yet express some sort of dismay as to the sorry state of the communities they were nominally responsible for... Such moderators, like a gardener who does not want dirt under their nails, are best encouraged to find other hobbies.
Yes, it's a balancing act. It should be noted that abusers also tend to be very good at painting people dangerous to them as abusers, so it's difficult to start with. Generally speaking you look at a person talking about vegetarianism and decision theory to some other people in a corner, and you don't usually think "this will end in them murdering their landlord with a samurai sword." We at least managed to ban her from the community after the suicides, which was still well before she became famous, and before that I can only say that it's just very hard to notice that you have to ban a person from a community if she's mainly keeping to herself and talking.
I can't speak to your specific scenario, but in general a "balance" that is missing in many communities is a clear line between pedagogy and research (or debate). Often this is because _initially_ the community is small and the distance in knowledge between members is minor - debate and knowledge-sharing go hand in hand. As the community grows though, the number of people joining who have little or no baseline knowledge compared to the founding group grows larger, until eventually it dwarfs the size of the core group.
This is when co-mingling becomes actively dangerous. New members may (often, will) lack the necessary knowledge to identify core vs. fringe beliefs, to contextualize debates, to recognize insider "shorthand" for what it is, etc. They need (and are possibly even looking for) a useful education, not to become test subjects or disciples. They _cannot_ be engaging in useful research at this stage, even if this is what they wish to do (there are some unfortunate status-seeking behaviors that can come into play here).
Also coming with this scale are a crap-ton of meta discussions concerning basic community governance, including those around "how quickly do we have to kick out crackpots to keep them from recruiting here?" Those discussions _also_ shouldn't be co-mingled with the educational structure, although it's good for new folks to have some visibility into them and at least know that this sort of governance _exists_ in a tangible way (because if it's opaque, that thing you noted about crackpots playing victim becomes a LOT more effective).
This is all a huge amount of boring, tedious work, and... An awful lot of communities start in on it waaaay too late or don't bother at all. What if it stops being fun and exciting and everyone leaves? Of course, there are worse ways to go, but folks tend not to think about those until after they've happened.
A lot of these designs are an artifact of a time when the panels themselves would have been far and away the most expensive component in the system. The place I'm in originally had 10 125W panels that probably cost north of $8k when installed, and they were mounted on a rotating, tilt-adjustable post. Also the entire house was wired to run off DC as much as possible, with three different wiring schemes throughout and rare & expensive appliances. It reminded me strongly of RV power schemes, and maintenance was probably a huge headache.
I replaced it all with 9kW worth of panels (about $3k, shipped) on 4 simple 60° ground mounts, normal wiring and appliances. Angle is optimized for early spring / late fall - there's effectively no sun in winter, and the rest of the year I have excess power even with fixed, sub-optimal angles.
The diminished cost of panels alone over the past 20 years has transformed "off-grid" from a pastime for wealthy hippies into a reasonable solution for remote living.
In practice, this complexity means you at least have a chance. Most phones and almost all low-power devices will accept power from most chargers and cables. Probably not at a maximum level, but if you're stuck somewhere you can get by.
Power-hungry laptops are trickier, but even so... I've gone a week or more trickle charging a laptop from whatever travel charger I happened to have on hand, using it for a few hours, then putting it in standby and charging it up again until finally the mfg-blessed replacement fast charger arrived. The alternative (and one I was faced with more than once in the bad old days) was "no laptop".
Worst experience I've had to date has been a Norco jump box that will charge via one high-power charger and one cable, a car charger it came with, and ... Via careful back feeding from a benchtop power supply.
I have successfully had am M1 MacBook open and in active use (albeit not with very heavy workload, mostly text editor and web), while plugged into a Nintendo Switch 1 charger (only thing I had handy at that moment), and was watching the battery percentage slowly increasing over time. So even laptops can sometimes charge slowly while in use with a rather underpowered type C charger (Albeit still slightly better than a cheapo 5V 3A Type-C phone charger).
The folks I know who've been prescribed fentanyl weren't particularly upset about it. It is very potent, and thus measuring the dose properly is very important, but it's not particularly fussy beyond that.
The people you know may be obtaining it from less reliable apothecaries; that can be a real issue.
Sustenance is a health benefit. Shelf life is a health benefit. Convenience is a health benefit.
If you have options when choosing food, a framework that helps you choose the better option is useful. The history of food production is mostly centered around developing options that provide, as a baseline, the three advantages you casually dismiss.
All three preservation techniques are practiced today as they have been since antiquity. It is not clear to me where food so preserved are likely to fall on the processed / ultra-processed spectrum...
Microwave meals go back to the 1950s. If anything the standard American diet was worse in the 1980s. The idea of "health food" was only starting to go mainstream.
You will find that SciFi has been mostly social commentary for quite a long time; what tends to throw us is familiarity!
reply